Thanks to Alec over at FYI, the site has a new look and some new features, and we'd love to know what you think. There a new landing page, with a mega-player from blip.tv, a reorg of the tabs and navigation, and a library that allows you to see groups of vids organized by developmental stage or subject. Please let us know what you think, and send us suggestions! What else would you like to see on DadLabs? You peoples is wicked smaaaat.

I'm digging what you've got going on here. And the home page works well, although the content below the mega-player is busy and hard to digest at first glance (needs more breathing room and/or darker headers). The overall navigation is very user friendly and I have to say better than anything Facebook's got goin' on (not a fan). The store is on the light side (I smell biz dev and partnering). I don't really like how the Ning sites have the email and friend requests at the top, but hey, it works. You've really got a nice site here and I'm happy to be a part of the hip daddy-o's.

I've been getting a lot of double banners and some problems loading video on the main page. I guess the site update explains that.<br><br>I would like to see you guys use the forum topics less for the giveaways in favor of going to some other mechanism like maybe a form to complete after watching the video? I don't think that the Post in the forums and you might get something tag makes for authentic conversation. I suspect that you are trying to drive traffic to more community content, which is good. It just seems like it's dumbing down the content when the most popular topics are the contest topics.<br><br>I'd also like to see some reviews of some of the sponsors' products, even if they aren't the daily feed stuff. For instance, we inherited two Baby Bjorns. I'm not really sure when I can turn my son around and expect him to like it. It also took a few weeks before I could get it on and off without hurting a rotator cuff. You guys would be doing us and the sponsor a favor by demo-ing these sorts of things.<br><br>But the content is great. Keep up the good work!

Absolutely! And why not a trading post / Craig's list type of section in the store?

The trading post/ Craigslist type of section is a great idea. Also some user reviews would be cool too.

I agree with regard to the giveaway mechanism. I think it seems like a weird way to force a conversation. If the community is going to evolve, it's going to have to be more organic.<br><br>I think the old cliche about leading a horse to water but not being able to force him to drink is very applicable here.

I love the idea of having an area for reviews of products! I spend quite a bit of time looking for reviews on Amazon before I ever buy any big item purchase. However, I think this community is such a great place to hear real people give their reccomendations.<br><br>I am always looking forward to Thursday when Daddy Troy has his newest product to review. I'd like to see much more of that!

I like the new layout. Cleaner, simpler and less busy is always better. I think the new page is a great stride in that direction. I really can't stand the clutter of MySpace and Facebook, and I suspect that other GenX geezers would probably feel the same way.<br><br>Also, with regard to the embedded video, the quality is always really great. You're obviously using a nice 3-chip camera, and paying a lot of attention to the lighting and sound, and those things just make for a much better viewing experience. I almost feel guilty watching the videos on YouTube because their compression is so horrendous that it really doesn't do justice to the work you put in to making the video look good. My only complaint is that my CPU runs at like 90%-100% when watching your videos...it takes a lot of horsepower to decode your high resoultion video!! But maybe that's my problem for sticking with my old 1.7GHz P4.

These comments are extremely useful to us.<br><br>In terms of the contests, based on the feedback here, we are going to try and separate those out from the discussions. I'd like to run longer contests, and maybe fewer, but I do like the idea of asking dads to submit pictures or videos that fit with the contest theme. We've used giveaways and contests as bait to try to attract more users away from the sites where most people see our videos (YouTube and the rest provide us with the VAST majority of our audience) to our community, where we can really engage in a conversation. We are obviously interested in hosting authentic conversation, but also in growing the site. Always experimenting with the mix, here at the Labs.<br><br>Keep 'em coming.

Just wanted to report something rather strange.....<br><br>I printed out the discussion on miniature toilets (wanted hardcopy of the list of vendors). Interestingly, it automatically printed out not only the toilet topic, but also the DadLabs About Us page. Then today I somehow managed to notice that if your mouse is hovering over the advertisement banner and you inadvertently hit your mouse scroll wheel, you will scroll through and view the About Us page. Guess that's related to the printing problem...

Just some more thoughts...<br><br>It seems like you can't enlarge the videos anymore. That could be a player thing or maybe the last Firefox update, but they won't got full screen anymore.<br><br>I'm not digging the difference in the menu between the normal front page and anything inside the community. One thing is that the Store link is gone. I would think that that's important to you guys. Several other things are nowhere near the same places they start. Since there are no links back to the topics a the bottom of the forum topic discussion pages, I use the Forum link at the top a lot.<br><br>One thing I would really like to see if for you guys to get Tivo distribution. I'd much prefer watching you guys on my televisions instead of small on the computer. I have about 10 Tivocasts I watch weekly. They're just Vlogs and Internet videos, most not as well produced as yours. I don't know how you get that started, but it would be nice.

Ben--<br><br>Thanks tons for this feedback. We get our player from blip.tv --I'm surprised the full screen feature is gone. I'll look into it. The store is one the top of our list, and should be back online in just a few days. Our site is a fusion of a couple of platforms -- we use squarespace to create pages (the front page, the about section, the store) and Ning to create the community. The two do not fuse seamlessly, which leads my to Nik's comment...<br><br>I'm on the TiVo thing. We should be there. Thanks again, B.

As an uber commenter I'd like to see a comment link on your videos here on DadLabs.com (on the front page) and not have to go to searching for it in the community section or on YouTube with the non-members to comment...<br><br>Not a biggie though...<br><br>And how about an updated blogs menu or page... I have to seek out members blogs on their profile pages (including DaddyClay)...

CN-- I am really frustrated that there is no commenting on the video on the front page. The only place you can comment on the vids on our site is under the videos tab in the menu bar. This stinks because the videos don't always post simultaneously to the front page and the videos page. Gr. This one really bugs me. The problem is having a comment string travel with the video from the front page to the archives. Part of the problem is having two platforms in our architecture -- Ning and Squarespace.

I noticed that(non-simultaneous posts). And most of the time, once you've watched it on the front page, you don't go and watch it again on Ning. Figured it was a tech issue... but yea, I obviously like commenting on the vids...

I can definitely second that part about adding comments to videos.<br><br>I never have been able to figure out how to watch a video on the community page and then contribute an insightful value-add observation....errr...I mean....comment.... I thought I was just being dumb, but now that someone else has mentioned it first, I'll step up and admit freely that I can't figure this out either.<br><br>Also, as Uber Commenter ConcretinNik mentions, I certainly don't want to associate myself with that rabble over there on YouTube

OK, now I look dumb anway, because I just noticed that Daddy Clay already responded to CN's comment about comments.

My main comment would be that I don't like the video automatically starting when I hit the page. Besides making the page load slowly, I usually have already watched the video (downloaded through Tivo, the best way to watch, btw) and just want to click through to the community/forums.

My bookmark to the site takes me directly to the community page, bypassing the front page. The most recent video is there as well, just not in autoplay. We leave the autoplay on the front page to snag the casual passer by.

Out of curiosity, which codec is used for the video? (H.264 or On6/Sorenson?). I ask because the video on the community page runs comfortably on my PC, but the larger scaled video on the Home page pegs my CPU at 100% and drops frames.

We use H.264 -- the big player is pretty when it works, but it does take some bandwidth to drive. If delivery continues to grow more efficient, we hope this will be less and less of an issue. How long until you can watch Owen's mug in HD? Probably too soon.

Thanks for the info. Good to know!<br><br>In my case at least, the issue is not available bandwidth from your video host to my PC. Rather, the issue is the amount of CPU horsepower (or lack thereof) that I have available on my desktop to decompress and decode the image. Even if I had a full 45Mbps OC-3 connection directly from your video host to my office, my PC would still not have enough horsepower to decode all of the pixels required for HD video.<br><br>From my end, I could alleviate this problem by either purchasing a new Dual Core CPU (don't want to do that) or I could purchase a new graphics card that includes DxVA acceleration. DxVA acceleration offloads the work of video decoding from the main CPU to a special purpose GPU (graphics processor). The latter solution is much more elegant, but it will only work with H.264, not with On6/Sorenson (another reason why H.264 is a good choice).<br><br>Also note that if you right-click on one of your videos you should be able to bring up the Adobe Flash settings panel, and you should be able to see a checkbox for Enable hardware acceleration. This is a dumbed down version of saying Enable DxVA.<br><br>I guess my bottom line here is that it's important to consider both available host-->client bandwidth and available CPU or GPU power on the user's desktop.

Uh...Troy! Will you come and look at this, please! Sean's gone all technical on my ass.

I thought that maybe if I talked about technical/engineering stuff on DadLabs that might qualify as you know, like, work related, and therefore less guilt-inducing, instead of just 100% pure goof-off on a Friday afternoon...

FAIL! Hahahaha!